President declares Liberation Day in the capital; the city's violent crime is at a thirty-year low.

The President invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act on Monday, declaring a public safety emergency and placing the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control. He announced the deployment of 800 D.C. National Guard troops. He used the phrase “Liberation Day in D.C.” He described the capital as “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

The invocation of Section 740 is the first in the history of the statute. The statute was written in 1973. It has, until Monday, sat unused for fifty-two years.

The justification offered for the unprecedented action is a crime emergency. The data on the crime emergency, supplied by the Metropolitan Police Department itself, indicates that violent crime in the District of Columbia is down 26 percent year-to-date in 2025, on top of a 35 percent drop in 2024, and is presently at a thirty-year low. The mayor cited these figures the same afternoon. The figures are public. They are produced by the police department being federalized.

This is the structural problem. An emergency power, invoked for the first time in fifty-two years, requires an actual emergency. The premise of the emergency, on the public record produced by the agency in question, is mathematically contradicted by the agency’s own published data.

A serious country distinguishes between a sentence and a measurement. The sentence on Monday was “bedlam.” The measurement, on the same day, on the same agency’s website, was a thirty-year low.

It is possible to believe both things. It is not possible to act on both things at once.

Calmly documenting the decline.